Breadcrumb

‘Kids are still being stoned as they walk to school’

In a week that saw Israel’s parliament retroactively approve Jewish settlements illegally built on privately owned Palestinian land, one of the world’s intractable disputes returned to the headlines. But how does the bitter Israel-Palestinian conflict affect the day-to-day education of those living through it? Adi Bloom reports from schools on both sides of the divide

Once, when Nasser Nawaja was walking to school, he and his brother came across something that looked like an empty bottle. As small boys will, he picked it up, and pulled out the cork.

“It was a grenade – a stun grenade,” he says. “It burned my belly. I ran all the way back home.”

Mr Nawaja (pictured, below) is older now: he is the head of a five-village collective in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank. But, in the area of the South Hebron Hills where he lives, going to school remains one of the most dangerous things that a child can do.

In the village of Susiya, where Mr ...

The horrors of conflict

The lives of children in the occupied territories are the focus of a row going on in schools across Israel at the moment.

Breaking the Silence, an organisation of Israeli Defence Force veterans, was founded in 2004 to tell the Israeli public about the reality of army service in the occupied territories: how soldiers treat civilians – including children – in the line of duty. While the organisation primarily works with adults, it has been invited by a number of high-school principals to address pupils who will shortly be conscripted into the army themselves.

But now the Israeli minister of education, Naftali Bennett, who is also the leader of the far-right Jewish Home party, is attempting to stop such groups from speaking in schools.

Mr Bennett is attempting to pass a law giving him the right to ban “negative groups” from schools. Expected to be passed within the next month, the law will give Mr Bennett the right to decide which groups are negative.

“We’re in the middle of an identity war,” says Avner Gvaryahu, of Breaking the Silence. “We are a voice, on the liberal side. It’s small but it’s there. School principals are standing by us, but it’s definitely an uphill battle.”